Ares wrote:
And while I love the Spider (and the Shadow to a lesser extent), my favorite Pulp hero has to be this guy:

That looks awesome.

The Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage books are frequently a lot of fun and awesome. They include everything from lost Roman Legions found in the heart of Africa to Nazi saboteurs apparently aligned with the lost mermen of Atlantis.

I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.

The Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage books are frequently a lot of fun and awesome. They include everything from lost Roman Legions found in the heart of Africa to Nazi saboteurs apparently aligned with the lost mermen of Atlantis.

I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.

The Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.

The Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage books are frequently a lot of fun and awesome. They include everything from lost Roman Legions found in the heart of Africa to Nazi saboteurs apparently aligned with the lost mermen of Atlantis.

I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.

The Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.
Than you. Are they appropriate for younger readers as well? My youngest is 13 and this would interest him.

I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.

The Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.

Than you. Are they appropriate for younger readers as well? My youngest is 13 and this would interest him.

Hmmm. They don't include any overt sexual activity or generally a lot of gore, but the writer has a lot of fun with language, and include a lot of 1930s slang. But if you don't mind explaining some terminology to him occasionally, they should be fine.

The Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.

Than you. Are they appropriate for younger readers as well? My youngest is 13 and this would interest him.

Hmmm. They don't include any overt sexual activity or generally a lot of gore, but the writer has a lot of fun with language, and include a lot of 1930s slang. But if you don't mind explaining some terminology to him occasionally, they should be fine.

If your going to be ordering Pulp books,then i also recommend Walter P.Gibson's The Shadow Strikes,as it's not only a decently good Noir,but also a nice intro to the Arguably Greatest Hero of the Pulp era...And that say's ALOT given who was around at the time.

To ease younger kids into this Era,i'd recommend Tarzan.Yes,it can be violent,but not overtly violent like Conan or even my beloved Shadow.It also may get them into Animals and Nature,as Edgar tended to give exacting detail into Animal behavior(the only reason Tarzan wasn't killed was because the female Gorilla had lost her child a day beforehand...).

Ares wrote:
And while I love the Spider (and the Shadow to a lesser extent), my favorite Pulp hero has to be this guy:

That looks awesome.

The Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage books are frequently a lot of fun and awesome. They include everything from lost Roman Legions found in the heart of Africa to Nazi saboteurs apparently aligned with the lost mermen of Atlantis.

That’s funny- I wonder if Roy Thomas was referencing that when he put Merrano and others with the Nazis in his Invaders run.

The Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage books are frequently a lot of fun and awesome. They include everything from lost Roman Legions found in the heart of Africa to Nazi saboteurs apparently aligned with the lost mermen of Atlantis.

That’s funny- I wonder if Roy Thomas was referencing that when he put Merrano and others with the Nazis in his Invaders run.

Unfortunately not. Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon was written in 2013. Will Murray writes modern era Doc Savage stuff, but set in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Why does it have Kenneth Robeson on the cover? Because Kenneth Robeson was a pseudonym used by all of the Doc Savage writers, starting with his co-creator and main contributor, Lester Dent. It's become something of a joke/badge of honor that anyone who writes a Doc Savage story do so under the Kenneth Robeson name to keep up the "illusion" that Doc has only ever been written by one person.

Murray is a Doc Savage scholar and is actually the executor of Dent's estate and holdings. However, the books Murray has released since 2011 were all scripts and outlines Dent had been working on, and which he fleshed out and wrote himself in Dent's style. Basically, Murray's stuff is good if you want to get the flavor of a Pulp era with less of the purple prose used at the time and with less of the stuff that might potentially offend modern audiences.

Roy Thomas did write some Doc Savage comics for Marvel, so he was definitely aware of and influenced by the character.

I took it personally with how The Lone Ranger movie was handled, He was always a hero of mine. I have a radio album framed on my living room wall. I hope they do Doc Savage justice. I fear they will not. I think the older Skarsgard brother( name is escaping me) would have been a better choice.

But yeah, I always liked the Lone Ranger as well, and it hurt to see what they did to the character in that movie, everything from turning him into this total joke to having the Silver Bullets being there to kill the villain who was a Wendigo, to Tonto being played by frickin Johnny Depp with that stupid bird on his head.

I just . . . the whole reason the Lone Ranger used Silver Bullets was two fold: to let everyone know who had fired said shot, and to be a constant reminder that, like silver, every human life is precious. The Longer Ranger went for disabling and disarm trickshots because he didn't believe that human lives should be taken needlessly. But instead of staying true to that, they turned it into a joke.

I felt the same way about the John Carter of Mars film, which captured the look and feel of Barsoom but none of the soul of any of the characters. The one bright spot was making Dejah Thoris less of a damsel in distress, but having her be some action scientist was a bit much. Still, the movie had so much potential that it completely squandered.

And it would have been dirt simple to make the general premise of the Lone Ranger film work. Have the LR come out west to help his brother out, but instead of a lawyer, it's because he was sort of a world traveler picking up different skills. His dad was a Texas Ranger and taught both boys how to shoot, but maybe the LR wanted to do other things. He used his gun skills to be a trick shooter, then worked on becoming an actor, but he felt a calling to do work as a lawman, but wanted to be smarter about it, so he traveled to France and studied under either Eugène François Vidocq (the father of modern detective/policeman, and a VERY interesting character), or under one of his men, learning the ins and outs of proper police work, how to blend in with criminal society, etc.

So when he comes back, he's got this eclectic collection of skills he can use to help his brother out, and he demonstrates it when he comes home, both in trick shooting and beating up some local toughs in a fist fight. But then the LR goes with his brother on the ambush that sees the brother dead and the LR saved by Tonto, who is in fact the LR's childhood friend and who his brother was often asking for advice on tracking down criminals.

From there, the LR recovers, finds his silver mine, and unironically makes his statement about the preciousness of life. He then employs his disguise skills around town to infiltrate the criminal elements, uses his detective skills to track them down, make it clear that Tonto is better at tracking, steal and close-in fighting, and once the round up the bad guys, make it clear he's going to keep fighting for actual justice in the west.

And don't get me started on what they did to the Lone Ranger's nephew with that damned Green Hornet film.

In all honestly,and this is REALLY sad if you think about it,the best Pulp Movie they've made out from Tensile-town was either Alec Baldwin's The Shadow or Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow...

Well, the Indiana Jones movies (the first three, anyway) are probably the best Pulp films to come out of Hollywood in the last 30 years, though some of the Mummy films were entertaining enough on their own, the Rocketeer was good fun, etc. But yeah, it's amazing how bad they are at making a simple action/adventure period piece.

Speaking of which Ares, here's another person's idea for an update of the Lone Ranger (this was written before the movie was released.)

So the buzz around the internets is that Gore Verbinski will be remaking The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp playing Tonto. Let us leave aside the fact that despite Depp being generally pretty cool he is still bleach for the purposes of whitewashing a character, because every other site talking about this seems to have forgotten that Johnny Depp, despite some purported Cherokee ancestry, is still basically a white guy.

No, let us instead discuss the merits of a Lone Ranger remake, which has not received entirely kind press from the movie blogging community, mostly because the Lone Ranger seems sort of corny. Which is ridiculous, of course, because the guy has the finale of the William Tell Overture – one of the most exciting bits of classical music ever – as his theme, and no trailer with a lot of explosions and horse ridin’ and shootin’ set to the William Tell Overture is going to be boring.

If they asked me to write it, I’d go to the Mask of Zorro well and make it generational. Have the original Lone Ranger emerge out of the Bleeding Kansas period – Texas Rangers were known to occasionally cross into Kansas, and the possibility that a group of Texas Rangers could have been involved in something horrific involving escaped slaves – or at least allowed it to happen – and disillusion the Lone Ranger so much so that he would abandon his unit and become, well, the Lone Ranger? That seems entirely reasonable.

Now, if the Lone Ranger gets his start in northern Texas and Kansas, that means he’s not very far off from the historic stomping grounds of several of the Apache tribes. So let’s say Tonto is an Apache. The Apache were, frankly, some of the baddest asses of the southwest native tribes of the time – a lot of other tribes thought, not unfairly, that they were kind of crazy. And they didn’t like anybody.

So why the Lone Ranger/Tonto partnership? Well, in Apache legend, there’s a pair of heroes/demigods/myths (their exact status is unclear) named Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies. These two always work as a pair. Were the Lone Ranger – not yet the Lone Ranger yet, not really – to stumble into an Apache camp, half-dead from exhaustion and thirst, in such a way as to resemble many of the legends surrounding the beginning/birth/genesis of Child-Born-of-Water, perhaps the medicine men of the camp would suggest that he not be killed off in the usual way but watched closely, to make sure this was indeed a child of Usen. Sticking Tonto – antisocial even among his own, but with the Power that very few Apache have, to leave no tracks and know men’s thoughts – with him to make sure he didn’t die of eating the wrong snake. Eventually sending the two of them off together to defeat the enemies of mankind, as the legends demand that Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies do. And thus begins a partnership that lasts twenty years.

Twenty years later, with the Ranger and Tonto in their late forties, it’s a new era: the peak of the Wild West, and not coincidentally the sunset of the Apache nations. Mangas Coloradas was killed in 1863. Cochise is jailed in 1872, dies in 1874. His son Taza dies in 1876. Geronimo lasts until 1886, but by the 1870s he’s reduced to small-scale guerilla raids and escaping from the whites on a regular basis.

This is when the Lone Ranger dies, in the course of protecting innocents (as you might expect). Tonto tries to go home, but by this point there’s not really any home left for him to which he might return. And one of those people is a young man whose family was murdered by a rail baron relentlessly expanding west, who only wants revenge – but, as Tonto sees, for a second time a white man satisfies the legends of Child-Born-of-Water’s birth…

And I just finished up the first official novel crossover of Doc Savage and the Shadow. While the villain was a bit lower tier for the meeting of such mega-heroes, the interplay between the two of them was great. It really shows them both as being effective and dangerous, and we do get a fight between the heroes. There's a second crossover between the two that I plan to start soon.

So I listen to Doc Savage audiobooks while I exercise, and I came across a moment that I feel needs sharing. It comes from the following novel:

In it, Doc Savage is facing an ancient Mongolian conqueror who was entombed in a cave of ice but was revived in the 1940s, and immediately starts up his conquering ways. Doc's attempts to deal with the man are complicated by the Japanese choosing this moment to bomb Pearl Harbor, making this the first Pulp hero I've read where we see a clear transition from the traditional Pulp Era of the 20s and 30s into World War II.

In any case, at one point in the novel, Doc challenges the leader of the Mongolian army to a one-on-one sword duel, which he wins. The leader's extremely loyal 2nd-In-Command has the small army at his disposal attack Savage. Doc initially picks up the other man's sword and starts dual wielding them to fend off the attack horsemen. Doc is doing his best not to kill his opponents, and eventually concludes that he's having to be more careful with the blades, so he discards them.

And then he starts punching.

Men. Horses. It doesn't matter what. Like Ivan Drago, whatever Doc Savage punches goes down after a single hit. At one point he punches the horse of a charging rider, then as horse is in mid-fall, punches the rider off of said horse before turning to keep the fight going.

Doc Savage basically pulls a one man army, so the 2nd-In-Command has his men try to capture Doc's squad of 5 aids. Seeing his men are in trouble, Doc decides to get everyone's attention focused back on him. He does this in the following manner.

When a Mongolian horseman rides up and tries to attack him, Doc smacks the sword out of his hand.

Doc then reaches down under the horse and grabs it by the underside of its body.

Doc then lifts the horse with the rider still atop it over his head.

Doc then throws the horse and rider both into a packed mass of other horses and riders, sending them all sprawling.

The sound and impact are so powerful that EVERYONE stops what they're doing and just stares at Doc dumbfounded.

I'd love to see a modern Pulp-homage author do a tale where Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, Operator No. 5, the Domino Lady, Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, et al take on their Axis counterparts; there were indeed actual German and Italian pulps, and pre-Imperial Japan sported several pulp-style serialized comics as well. Now, while the characters featured therein reflected their respective cultural prejudices even in the pre-Fascist days, their protagonists and stories took a seriously evil bent with the rise of the Nazis and Nippon militarists.

The most infamous example is Sun Koh the Atlantean. Essentially a Doc Savage analogue in abilities and appearance, his "adventures" turned from thwarting occult menaces and mad scientists to battling "Zionist" conspiracies against the Reich, conquering (or annihilating) truculent natives of hidden lands to steal their resources, and obtaining mystic treasures for use by Der Vateland. Thankfully, pulps were soon deemed irrelevant to the war effort and an unnecessary use of paper, so the Axis anti-heroes vanished into obscurity for the most part.

There HAVE been modern-day Sun Koh books, written with him as the main character but clearly as a villain protagonist. Surprised no one's done a crossover yet.